Intro. Phil Sci & Tech Questions - well, okay, not intro in some cases. Some of them might do in "small chunks". Some are foundational questions in their respective disciplines and only peripherally (?) have philosophy of science-ish feel. - Should design of pharmaceutical drugs be considered a technology or a science? - Is recommending unscientifically verified health treatements ethically acceptable? - Is science epistemologically compatible with religion? - What is objectivity? What is its role in scientific research? - Can there be perfect measurements (i.e., ones with no error)? In practice? In principle? If so, under what sorts of conditions? - Is there a role for aesthetic values in science? In what context? - What is the relationship between mathematics and the world? - Is the epistemology of science rationalist? empiricist? neither? both? How so? - Is science possible without the principle of lawfulness? (i.e. the postulate that the universe contains objective patterns) - Should ESP be ruled out a priori (until new notice)? Why or why not? - Is psychoanalysis (homeopathy | graphology | UFOology | thought field therapy) pseudoscience? - Should Aristotle be called the first scientist? Why or why not? - What is pseudoscience? - Sandra Harding, in _The Science Question in Feminism_, claims that Newton's laws of motion are a rape manual. Discuss this claim. - Who should fund pure scientific research? - Kurt Gödel is reported as saying that our knowledge of mathematics is an imperfect representation of a preexisting reality. Discuss. (See _Reflections on Kurt Gödel_, by Hao Wang, for Gödel's views.) - Mario Bunge argues against artificial intelligence by claiming that computers "can only do what they are programmed to do" and have no creativity. Defend this claim or argue against it. (See also Turing's discussion of this objection which he calls the "Ada Lovelace reply" in his paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence") - Is logic about the world or rather about what we can say about the world? - Is psychoneural dualism consistent with physiological psychology? - All measured quantities in physics are indicated by an angle or a length. Does that entail that all properties are "au fond" angles and lengths? - Why or why not is the Lucretius principle (nothing from nothing and into nothing, nothing) necessary for science? - Berkeley thought that "to be is to be perceived". Discuss the similarity between this view and the "Copenhagen" interpretation of quantum mechanics. Draw any relevant morals. - Plato thought that knowledge of the sensible world was impossible due to the fact that it is always in flux. He postulated perfect "forms" to account for objects of knowledge. How similar are these to the "universals" thought to allow for science? - "Law" has several (at least 3) distinct meanings in science and technology. Elucidate at least two of them and emphasize their distinctions. - Metaphysics is traditionally thought to be disjoint from science. Analyze this thesis. - Kant thought that arithmetic was an example of synthetic a priori knowledge. Is it? Pay close attention to the differences and similarities between addition and physical juxtaposition as well as Kant's thesis about the nature of time. - Leibniz thought it would be possible to demonstrate (i.e. provide a proof for) Euclid's axioms. Was he right? - Thales is the earliest of the _phusikoi logoi_ discussed by Aristotle. He has traditionally been called the first philosopher. Should he be also called the first scientist? - Is atomism or plenism correct? - Can science give us knowledge of appearances only, or of things in themselves too? - Why or why not is research performed with animal subjects justified? (HINT: in what sense justified?) - Is formal incompleteness undesirable in factual scientific theories? - Chemistry is said to have the most known law statements. Explain, and then argue that this claim is perhaps unjustified because one could group many of the law statements into equivalence classes (e.g. instead of Li + Br2 -> LiBr, Li + Cl2 -> LiCl, etc. one would just have alkali metal + halogen -> alkyl halide). Resolve the dispute. - Call something _grue_ if it is green now and blue after January 1st, 3000. Given that the (visual) evidence for emeralds being green is also evidence for them being grue, is there a way to more legitimately say "all emeralds are green", and avoid "gruesome" predicates? (This is actually still baffling some philosophers, when IMO the solution is trivial. If you agree the solution is trivial, explain why philosophers continue to be baffled.) - Elucidate the differences (if any) between nomological and logical necessity. - History is sometimes regarded as a branch of the humanities and sometimes as a science. Which view(s) is/are correct? Why? Consult, e.g., Bunge, _Social Science Under Debate_; Windschuttle, _The Killing of History_; Kaplan, _The Strategy of Inquiry_ - Which notion(s) of probability are used in science or technology? - Kant is sometimes called the "philosopher of newtonianism." Is this correct? In what respect? Pay careful attention to his _Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science_. - Is Marx a philosopher of science? of technology? - Ought one adopt the generalized continuum hypothesis as an axiom in set theory? - D. H. Mellor has tried to prove that the notion of unmediated action at a distance is incoherent (not just false). Analyze the conceptual possibility of succeeding at such a task. Be sure to make use of the history of science. - Obtain a scientific instrument of any kind; study its function. Illustrate how it "embodies a law." (Or several.) What sort of knowledge therefore does one need in order to properly make use of it? Draw any conclusions for science education policy. - Is category theory a good foundation for mathematics? - Is chemistry a branch of physics? - What metaphysical concepts does the explanation of a chemical reaction involve? (For a list of some possibilities, see (e.g.) volume three of M. Bunge, _Treatise on Basic Philosophy_.) Show how with an illustrative example. - Does a concept have to be quantitative in order to be expressed in mathematical language? Draw appropriate lessons for the "math phobic" sciences/humanisitic disciplines. - What is the role of aesthetic values in technology? - Are classification levels (e.g. domain, kingdom, phylum, etc.) used in biology "in the things themselves" or in our means of classification? Or is there a sense in which both are true? Explain your position. Illustrate with cases, if possible. - Are there laws of archaeology? If there are any, are these unique to it, or are they imported from other disciplines? - What is(are) the difference(s) between formal and factual truth? Do these correspond to the traditional philosophical notions of "synthetic" and "analytic" truths? - Is theoretical computer science a branch of mathematics? Keep in mind that all computers are *things*, not formal objects. - Husserl thought that scientific psychology was impossible. Analyze his claims. - Is artificial intelligence a technology, an area of applied science, or an area of basic science? - Some linguists think that computer programming languages are not languages at all; that the name involves an equivocation. Discuss this case. - What, if any, are the merits and demerits of the operation known as _verstehen_ in social studies? - Neoclassical economics postulates that all individuals act to maximize their expected utility. What is the evidence for this axiom? - Evaluate the scientific status of evolutionary psychology. - Some philosophers have claimed that it is not important for scientific theories to be approximately true; instead they propose that the theories be "empiricially adequate." Analyze this thesis. - Use the notion of error as it occurs in the theory of errors to formulate a possible critique of subjectivism. (HINT: Build a theory of partial truth.) - What is the domain of one of the truth valuation functions? Is the function total? - Whitehead has claimed that modern science supports the idea that there are no things, merely events. Is this claim logically tenable? Metaphysically? - Why do logics work? (HINT: Ask for a grant.) - Russell thought the notion of cause disappears from the more advanced sciences. For a reply, see Bunge, _Causality and Modern Science_. Argue for either side; show where the other is mistaken. (See also C. Hitchcock, "Of Humean Bondage" for a possible middle ground.) - Do fuzzy set theories solve problems associated with vague predicates? - Do semantics for a programming language capture "all of what a particular program does" when applied to a specific program? - You are given a machine that can perform a literally infinite sequence of computations in a finite time. Can this machine solve the halting problem? - Evaluate Penrose's arguments against artificial intelligence. - Evaluate Dennett's claim that evolution (or natural selection, perhaps) is (or embodies) an algorithm. (HINT: It might be fruitful to distinguish two meanings of "algorithm.") - What is the scientific status of the field known as "memetics?" - Andrea Nye has said that traditional logic is sexist. Evaluate her claim. - The logical positivists emphasized the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification. This distinction has come under attack recently. Defend it or shore up the attackers. An illustrative case to possibly consider is Kekulé's discovery of the structure of the benzene molecule. (See, e.g., _The Norton History of Chemistry_.) - Illustrate how the theories of relativity (or quantum mechanics) give no solace to subjectivists, pace many popular science books and such like. - Is there any use in science or technology for a set theory that denies the usual axiom of foundation? If there is one, does it also presuppose a set theory that adopts said axiom? Draw any conclusions necessary. - Awodey recently has given axioms for a logic based on topoi of sheaves. Does his account presuppose any logic? Draw any lessons necessary. - What is the role of analogy in scientific research? - Some philosophers have claimed that scientific statements are metaphors, not statements which are true or false. Examine this claim. - Select a philosophical problem from McCarthy's famous paper "Some Philosophical Problems from the Standpoint of Artificial Intelligence." Discuss how McCarthy deals with it and compare it to a traditional view or views on the subject. - What sorts of metaphysical hypotheses about causation are necessary in order to develop models of reasoning about causation? - Feyerabend claimed that the notions of mass in (e.g.) Newtonian mechanics and relativistic mechanics were incommeasurable; hence the two theories in question were not about the same properties and things; hence also the theories could not be rationally compared; hence prefering one of them over the other for a given purpose could not be a rational decision. Is this chain of reasoning correct? - What scientific role did the work of Francis Bacon play in the development of modern science in the 17th century? - Can one do experiments in history? geology? any so called "historical science?" - Should the concept of "life" as a thing be replaced with the the notion of "living", a process? - Which concept is more useful in science, Bunge's notion of an emergent property, or Kim's notion of a supervenient property? - Characterize the _ethos_ of scientific research. ----------- - It is possible that some of the opposition by traditionally minded philosophers to the notion of partial truth comes from the consideration that it appears a given statement cannot be decomposed into a "true part" and a "false part." Explore this possibility. - It has been asserted that non-classical logics (e.g. so called default logic) are the way to go in AI because of the computational complexities involved in pure first order logic. Does AI really shed the reliance on first order logic? Pay attention to the distinction between what might be called the logic of implementation from the logic of description. - Hacking has thought there is no one scientific method because each branch of science uses different techniques: chemists with their glassware and purification methods; biologists with agar plates and so on. Is this argument cogent? Pay attention to the possibility that the scientific method is a "metamethod" - a method that guides specific methods. - Some recent sociologists of science have claimed that their investigations into the networks of science need not pay attention to the actual scientific outcome of the scientific research they are investigating. Is this tenable? (HINT: pay close attention to the outcome desired by the sociologists.) - Some sociologists of science have done detailed reconstruction of historical cases to show that the "boundaries of science are fluid" and such (e.g. _Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line_, by T. Gieryn.) Analyze one of these cases in the light of their thesis. Can a merely sociological investigation show that the boundaries of science are fluid in any interesting way? (HINT: elucidate all of the important words in these questions.) - Must explanation come to an end? Consider the possibility that one had reached the most basic level of reality. Would this level be explainable or merely describable? - Some theists have claimed that the most basic scientific laws are only positable as "brute facts" an atheistic framework. Examine this possibility in the light of the materialist conception of scientific laws as objective patterns in things and their properties, not as "impositions from without" as would be the case in an idealist (and hence, in a theistic) world view. - Is semantic entailment more or less *epistemically* basic than syntactic entailment? - It has been claimed there are no laws in biology. Examine this claim. - What characteristics of a society make good scientific research possible? - What role do philosophers of science have in the scientific enterprise? - What role do philosophers of science have in the philosophical enterprise? - It is often claimed that the big bang marks the begining of our universe. Is this correct under the original meaning of universe? Pay close attention to what physicists now mean by the word. What are the metaphysical lessons to be learned here? - What ought to be the difference between psychiatry and clinical neurology in a properly scientific weltanschauung? Does an "anatomy/physiology" or "structure/ function" distinction do the trick? - It is often said that certain disorders are psychological as opposed to physiological or neurological in etiology. Does adopting this distinciton amount to tacit psychoneural dualism? - What is involved, if anything, in the "unity of science?" - Characterize (medicine|law|international relations|management|education) as a technology. Distinguish the practice from the technology in question. - Some people are opposed to psychiatry on the grounds that it involves an "imposition of correct thinking" and thus is morally illegitimate. Analyze this claim, keeping in mind that one might view a cancer treatment as an "imposition of correct cellular divisions." - Galileo got into trouble with the ecclesiastical and scientific authorities of his day for suggesting that the heavens were "imperfect" and such like. Did he have enough evidence for some of these claims? Some have recently asserted that "the church was right" because (e.g.) Galileo had insufficient evidence and acted with certainty. Unravel all of this. - Many of the ancient atomist schools were materialist (in both India and Greece). Because of this, they were often regarded with suspicion by religious authorities. Are there any parallels with these cases and the current views concerning evolution, cosmology and other fields by current so-called creationists? - Do "science studies" disciplines (e.g. history of science, rhetoric of science, sociology of science) need a definition of "science" or "scientific" or similar words? Can they develop such without the philosophy of science? - Explore the views of the pragmatist philosophers of science. Pay close attention to whether they distinguish between science and technology. Further, are the so called "neopragmaticists" such as Rorty really "on the same page" as the pragmaticists of the 19th century such as Peirce? Consult Haack's work for one view on the question. - The phrase "social construction" is used a lot in contemporary social studies. Analyze the various meanings given to it. - In what respect(s) is science universal? ------------- - The sociologist/anthropologist of science Bruno Latour has subjected Einstein's special theory of relativity to what he calls a "semiotic analysis." Explain this operation and determine what sorts of insights it is capable of giving about the scientific enterprise and, in particular, about scientific knowledge claims. - Examine critically the discipline known as "rhetoric of science." For example, some rhetoricians have claimed they can show why certain scientific claims were believed; can this be done using means of rhetorical studies only? - Examine the possible differences between the concepts of ontological reductionism and ontological monism. - In popular presentations of relativity theory, it is said that energy and matter are equivalent, claiming that they are so by the famous equation E=mc^2. Notice that this exposition is wrong on semantico-ontological grounds alone (energy being a property and matter being a stuff). Draw any lessons about the importance of semantics for science and in particular for scientific popularizations. (You may wish also to consult the work of Maxwell, who in the 19th century corrected this error in a way that stands to this day.) - It is sometimes claimed that there can be no science of the social as "social situations are unique and therefore lawless." Discuss this claim. Pay attention to Lewontin's dictum about things being different all the time in some respects making science necessary and things being the same all the time in others making it possible. - Should scientific *concepts* be simplified in scientific popularizations? - How should fraud in scientific research be detected and dealt with? ------------- - "Materialism" has both an ontological meaning and a meaning having to do with "base interests" and no interest in higher culture, etc. This later meaning is sometimes called "cupidity." Discuss the relationships between these terms in the philosophy of economics expounded by Marx in, e.g. _The German Ideology_. - Explore the thesis that a difference in ambient metaphysics was a primary difference between Europe and China which explains the rise of modern science in Europe but not in China. Pay attention to negative evidence. - Many "native" or "aboriginal" cultures around the world possess traditional knowledge of (e.g.) local plants. Is this knowledge scientific? Why or why not? - Are there any general principles by which one can determine whether it is "safe" to start turning applied science into technology? Discuss. - What are the basic features of a machine? - It has been claimed that because properties only "manifest" themselves in interaction with others, all properties are hence relational. Evaluate this claim. - Is spacetime a network of relations, a substance, a causal agent, or something else? Make sure your answer is consistent with contemporary physics. ------------ - What distinguishes scientific explanation from other kinds of explanation? (e.g. from religious explanations, every day life explanations, etc.) - Explore the possibility of generalizing Bohr's "correspondence principle" to argue against those that would find science unconfortable or irrelevant when it appeared to contradict certain ordinary experiences. - Some partisans of subjective probability and related ares have attempted stave off criticism by suggesting that their interest is normative, not descriptive. Use this dispute to discuss the degree to which a normative theory must also be descriptively adequate. ------------ - What are the reasons (if any) for being a realist about molecular shapes? Are the ones actually held by many working chemists the ones you have outlined? Why or why not? Are the ones held by chemists good ones? - Explore the thesis that good notation can aid scientific or mathematical discovery. Pay attention to historical or contemporary approaches. The former can be found in Descartes, Leibniz, Frege and others. Contemporary examples might include (more-or-less) standardized mathematical symbols, Kekule structures and Fischer projections and so forth in chemistry, the "free body diagram" approach in elementary dynamics, etc. Consider the distinction between a notation and methods of diagramming, if there is one. ------------ - Compare the "philosophical" views on measurement discussed by Mario Bunge with those of the engineers Patterson and Hennesey in their textbooks of computer architecture. ------------ - It is impossible (due to enormous times required) to exhaustively test the computationally relevant states of even a 4K RAM chip. Examine the testing procedures actually used by hardware engineers and discuss how they make use of scientific and technological knowledge to make ethical claims. - Textbooks and manuals of software engineering claim that different approaches to their field are warranted when different goals are intended for their software. Does the rise of general purpose computers running general purpose software (e.g. general operating systems) pose a threat to this principle? Draw any relevant ethical morals.